Brilliantly Stupid Character Concepts

[NRSASD]

I finally might be handing off the crown of DMing for a moment and getting to play in a D&D 5E one shot. I'm quite pleased with my character concept, which the rest of the party is in

I'm going to be a barbarian (not sure what race) of the Eagle Totem path, refluffed as the Butterfly Totem Path. He's going to have a background in tailoring, and is going to be introduced as wearing loose, shapeless brown clothes he made himself, the traditional garb of his people. He'll be rather soft spoken, reserved, and eat a ton.
But when he rages, he'll find the highest point on the battlefield and announce "I reject the Cocoon of Civility!" rips clothes in half, revealing his true colors "And embrace the Butterfly of Rage!"

He'll be wearing basically this underneath


Two questions for the Playground: What other butterfly/caterpillar motifs can I sneak into my barbarian's culture, and what are some examples of your favorite ridiculous characters?

As always, thanks for any and all help!

[Concrete]

You could have the shamans of his culture have a moth theme, if that ever comes up.

You could have him absolutely adore sweet stuff, mostly drinks, like mead and liqueurs and stuff.

He can sleep in some kinda mix of a tent and a hammock that hangs from a branch.

And a nasty mask that shows off the creepiest, most terrifying aspects of a butterfly's face could be rad.


As for strange concepts, I once played a wizard that has a hand theme, and almost only had touch spells, or spells which had an effect that looked like a hand. I had however vastly overestimated my ability to come up with hand-puns on the fly, and he quickly became painful to be around.

I did also play a Changeling: The Lost character with a moth theme, a private investigator who had a tendency to stray too close to the truth and get burned. He kept a bottle of baileys in his desk and summoned moths to spy on people. Admittedly, he was more fun to draw than to play.

[Lord Haart]

As for strange concepts, I once played a wizard that has a hand theme, and almost only had touch spells, or spells which had an effect that looked like a hand. I had however vastly overestimated my ability to come up with hand-puns on the fly, and he quickly became painful to be around.

OTOH, if you didn't have enough puns handy, you should've considered a more hands-off approach to roleplaying him. Handling every single one in-character is a handful.


*makes a Hide check*

Spoiler: More on-topic, i think about half my characters qualify (don't know if that's good or not).

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For example: had a paladine of Sune who was basically Johnny Bravo. Had a psionic android known as Brigadier, created for managing construction projects, whose intelligence was so high, he not only spoke about ten different languages, but did so without ever using a non-swear word (Russian allowed me to avoid even function words). And right now i'm playing a thieving, teenage half-elf girl who is also, secretly (though the party knows by now), a laguthrope — that is, a were-hare with a three-meters-tall hybrid form.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Half-Orc wizard. Low/middling mental scores, high physical scores. He admires smartness, but isn't terribly smart or wise himself. In combat he would cast buffs and then go into melee with a great axe.

Based on the general idea that people who enjoy certain vocations or hobbies aren't necessarily talented at them.

[SimonMoon6]

In 3.0, I had in mind a really stupid character that would have to be an NPC. My intention was for a group of PCs to need to hire one extra adventurer for some stupid bureaucratic reason, and they would have several to choose from (all of whom would be terrible). This particular guy used the 3.0 (not 3.5) version of the Foe Hunter prestige class.

The idea of this prestige class was that you choose a monster type and you get ranger-themed bonuses against that creature type, like bonuses to track and extra damage (similar to sneak attack damage) and stuff like that, if I remember right. So, the character I had in mind would be a Plant Hunter, a guy who absolutely HATES plants and wants to see them all dead. The downside would be that his class abilities would almost never come in handy. You can't track a daffodil because it's just sitting there and plants are immune to the bonus damage from the class. (Yes, shambling mounds, for example, could be tracked, but most plants would ignore of all his abilities.)

I loved this character for two reasons: (1) The idea of hating plants just seemed hilarious to me, especially since they're everywhere. (2) The idea that someone would hate plants so much that they would take a class specifically to be better at killing them, without actually getting better at killing them, also seemed funny to me.

I have heard that the 3.5 version of the class changed enough so that the Plant Hunter would *not* be useless, but I haven't looked at it.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

OTOH, if you didn't have enough puns handy, you should've considered a more hands-off approach to roleplaying him. Handling every single one in-character is a handful.


*makes a Hide check*

I have to hand it to you those are some solid puns, but they risk coming off as heavy handed. On the other hand that can sometimes be the point of excessive punning. Don't knuckle under if one or two don't land brush it off *accompanied by gesture* when you get fingered. If it seems like too much to handle imagine yourself sitting in the shade of a palm tree sipping on three fingers of rum in a freshly squeezed tropical punch of finger limes, Budda's palm and a whole hand of bananas.

Can I use sleight of hand to assist a hide check?

[Durandu Ran]

My favorite silly character I've ever cooked up was Saderik the Melancholy, an elf bard I made for a one-off Pathfinder session. I played him as gloomy, but also pleasant, courteous and conversational. I modeled my character voice after Noel Fielding, particularly his role of Richmond from The IT Crowd. I pronounced his name as "Sad Eric," and I had a running gag where I introduced myself as "Saderik... It's an elvish word that means joyful." My favorite spell was Sonic Scream because the idea of this weird goth bard wordlessly screaming at enemies as he strummed his lute was hilarious to me. Whip of Spiders was another spell that felt extremely right for the character, and I'm still on the lookout for a more long-term opportunity to play him again.

[The Jack]

Dwarf-Dwarf

A Dwarf with dwarfism, which isn't that noticable among dwarven kind but let it be known that he is the shortest, and thus the dwarfiest, dwarf to have ever dwarfed.

He had a real name but the players never bothered to ask. I never bothered to actually think of it. I think it would've been 'Shorty'.

I actually played him as LE, and he left his home on account of his people not being Dwarf enough for him (He got kicked out for being a ****). He joined a pirate crew and I wasted a skill on acrobatics (Str fighter) so he could tumble.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Mundogar the ettin. Two* players wanted to switch characters at the same time, and they came across rules for ettin characters. (One side played a barbarian, the other side played a warlock.) We knew that they would be incredible; we just didn't know if they'd be incredibly fun or incredibly annoying. Luckily, it was fun. A bit of it was mechanical, e.g. when Dogar would cast blink or something and leave the party without its tank. (You just had to be there.) The two personalities also bounced off each other in amusing ways; one incident that comes to mind is Dogar pushing Mundo into a river.
Their interactions with one of the other consistent characters also helped. I was playing a by-the-book aristocratic cleric who wound up the de facto party leader. He was a member of the Lord's Alliance, so the DM justified new characters as being sent by the Alliance; Mundogar was one of those characters, and they were eager to be "big heroes". Of course, they weren't always good at it; they didn't cause mayhem or anything like that, but they were consistent headaches to my cleric. (Though not to me, which is why it was fun.) It was a classic comic trio whenever the stakes weren't high enough to be taken seriously, but Mundogar knew how to take things seriously when he had to.

*Well, three, but the third player went through characters like coffee filters.

[TeChameleon]

My favourite ridiculous character I played was Big Yan, a Pixie Grapple Fighter.

Well, more properly 'Pictsie'- I played him as basically being a flying Nac Mac Feegle. It worked better than you'd think, courtesy of a minor bit of rules-lawyering- there were a bunch of Fighter grapple-powers in 4e on which any mention of size modifiers was conspicuously absent. So enemies would encounter this tiny, glowing, fight-happy imbecile, laugh... and get grabbed, dragged, and smashed through a wall twenty feet away

[Spore]

Maybe get a bite attack (improvised weapon = Tavern Brawler) for your caterpillar "form"? Like in "You don't deserve to see the majesty that is the butterfly! *chomp chomp*

My most fun idea recently was a Goblin Blackblade in Pathfinder (think Bladelock meets intelligent weapon) that found his Blackblade in the rubbish on the body of its previous owner. The weapon sees the goblin as a new wielder who is not worthy and bickers with it constantly. Of course the group cannot hear the sword. As the levels advance the weapon's ego will increase, eventually leading it to either rebel against the magus or accept it. So it's basically just a lunatic shouting at his sword that it missed deliberately and that the cursed thing should switch on its flaming ability already!

Another - PF - thing I made was a Wilfred Fizzlebang, Master Summoner! He never got to be played but the major gist would have been to flood the field with his summons, and I mean flood. I would drown the enemy in summons, eventually leaving me no choice than to use my Gate scroll. Which I would of course use to summon a Balor, and then try and convince it to help me.

[lukitux]

Let me tell you about the characters that my brother and I played during a wilderness survival game. (This was 5e BTW)

Timber the Axeman: This character was specialized in one thing: handaxes. He multiclassed to get both the two weapon fighting style and the archery fighting style. He also took dual-wielder and Sharpshooter so he could deal significant damage with hand axes in melee or ranged combat. He was a ranger/fighter and his backstory is that both his parents were lumberjacks who were killed by Treants. He took up each of his parents hatchets and trained for years in the art of axe-throwing and axe-combat. His favored enemy was plants.

The Beekeeper: This was my character, a Druid wearing a beekeepers outfit and carrying a hive of bees on his back. All his spells were insect-themed and he mostly used Infestation, Insect Plague and Giant Insect. He summoned swarms of bees for combat and all his healing spells were magic honey from his bees. He didn't really care about the adventures, the only reason he stayed around was because the party kept going to faraway exotic locations that had their own species of bees to add to his swarm and if he went alone the monsters would eat him.

[hotflungwok]

I had a DM tell us he was going to need to blow some steam off after defending his thesis, so he wanted to run us through Against the Giants, but in 3.5, using 3.5 giants. Yeah. He wanted us to all make 3 characters as minmaxed as we wanted (playing one at a time), and he'd see how many he could kill.

So I made a halfling wizard, necromancy specialist. His equipment: 1 large velvet bag with backpack type straps, some valuable gems, and a bunch of oils and potions. After looking over the character, the GM eyeballed me, wondering what I was up to. Early on someone made a crack about my character's size, something I was waiting for. My character goes off on a rant about stupid humans and elves towering over him, always looking down on him, and how he would show them all.

First encounter with a real giant, my character pulls out a gem and casts Magic Jar. The now possessed giant picks up the halfling's body, places it gently in the velvet bag, and puts the bag on. Then he takes some oil of Greater Magic Weapon and pours it on the giant's axe, drinks a potion of Rage (something like that?), turns to the surprised faces on the rest of the party and bellows 'Now I'm bigger than you! We're going where I wanna go! We're doing what I wanna do! I say we go go kick some ass!'.

He was a halfling with a height complex. He hated that other races were taller than him, and came up with a plan to deal with it. He possessed 2 or 3 giants that game, rushing recklessly into combat and jumping out of them when they got low on hp. The giant would snap back to his body and very very briefly wonder why his friends were killing him, while the halfling crawled out of the velvet bag over in the corner where it had been dropped at the beginning of the fight. One time the fighter couldn't open a giant sized door, and my character's possessed giant walked up to it and pushed it open with ease. He leaned down over the fighter and said 'Aww, does the wee human need some help opening that? Here, lemmie show you how it's done little man.'

He was fun. Kinda hard to do without starting at higher level, but I think the payoff would be much better with a campaign's worth of height jokes behind it.

[Spore]

The Beekeeper: This was my character, a Druid wearing a beekeepers outfit and carrying a hive of bees on his back. All his spells were insect-themed and he mostly used Infestation, Insect Plague and Giant Insect. He summoned swarms of bees for combat and all his healing spells were magic honey from his bees. He didn't really care about the adventures, the only reason he stayed around was because the party kept going to faraway exotic locations that had their own species of bees to add to his swarm and if he went alone the monsters would eat him.

Spoiler: You mean: Doctor Bees?!

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[GreatWyrmGold]

...eventually leaving me no choice than to use my Gate scroll. Which I would of course use to summon a Balor, and then try and convince it to help me.

That reminds me of the little demon-summoning kick Dogar (the warlock half of the ettin I mentioned earlier) went on. He only actually summoned demons once or twice, but the player (and maybe character?) talked about it more often than that.
My cleric didn't have the rolls required to identify the demons, so until Dogar incidentally mentioned that it was abyssal, not infernal, he had no idea what the warlock had just summoned. At which point he flipped out and alerted the nearby barbarians to just how bad of juju they were facing (apparently they knew the Common word for "demon").
...Dogar was not good at being a big hero.

[Bruno Carvalho]

I fondly remember my Halfling Druid/Nature Cleric and his trusty St. Bernard mount and animal companion (with the barrel and everything)

[RedMage125]

A player mine in 5e once made a Dragonborn Fey-Pact Warlock. It was fluffed as a pact with an elder Faerie Dragon. His breath weapon was poison (going off the hallucinogenic gas that faerie dragons use), and his Eldritch Blast was a blast of rainbow light.

He would occasionally say "Friendship is Magic!" when he blasted enemies with this.

[The Glyphstone]

I played in a (Very brief) Monster-PCs game as a Nine-Headed Hydra, who wore a Headband of Intelligence to raise its Int score to playable levels. Each head had its own personality/alignment, and they would occasionally fight over who got to wear the headband and be 'in control', which was determined randomly at random times. It was like playing my own subgame of Everyone Is John inside the regular campaign (which became a dumpster fire and died for unrelated reasons anyways).

[GreatWyrmGold]

For some reason, that reminded me of a campaign my group tried to start recently. We had basically no guidance on what the campaign was going to be about and little expectation that we would be able to take it seriously (because of the DM, long story), so we all decided on silly character concepts. I played a little druid girl who was raised by bears and could transform into one (I convinced the DM to let me get wild shape early and spellcasting late), and the rest of the party included an oblivious didgeridoo-playing bard, a criminal monk, a sorceress from another world (I think? The player didn't explain much of her backstory to the other players), and...well, his first plan was a corgi warlock (statistically a forest gnome) with a pixie familiar and a saddle, but he decided on an overly-optimistic centaur cleric instead. Oh, and the last player went with a town guardsman who was just saving up to buy a couple of pigs so he could propose to his sweetheart, a local girl named Marble.
Sadly, the campaign didn't get past the prologue before the DM's work schedule kicked in. The bits we saw were pretty generic (to the point that the DM accidentally copied the first chapter or so of the Dragonlance Chronicles), but the characters were fun.

[Beleriphon]

Two questions for the Playground: What other butterfly/caterpillar motifs can I sneak into my barbarian's culture, and what are some examples of your favorite ridiculous characters?

As always, thanks for any and all help!

"Feel the Sting of the Monarch!" I feel like anything The Monarch from Venture Bros. says would probably a good thing to use.

[Personification]

My favourite ridiculous character I played was Big Yan, a Pixie Grapple Fighter.

Well, more properly 'Pictsie'- I played him as basically being a flying Nac Mac Feegle. It worked better than you'd think, courtesy of a minor bit of rules-lawyering- there were a bunch of Fighter grapple-powers in 4e on which any mention of size modifiers was conspicuously absent. So enemies would encounter this tiny, glowing, fight-happy imbecile, laugh... and get grabbed, dragged, and smashed through a wall twenty feet away

On the one hand, this is amazing, but on the other hand, didn't your character's sword glow blue every time you had to rules-lawyer something?

[TeChameleon]

On the one hand, this is amazing, but on the other hand, didn't your character's sword glow blue every time you had to rules-lawyer something?

Pfft... Hah!

Got around that by the simple expedient of not having a sword

[Jay R]

Next time I start a 2e game at 60,000 xps or more, I will run a dual-class Fighter / Wizard, who has just reached the wizard level where she can do both.

She will have been a Fighter, and then settled down to raise a family. During the next 60 years, she and her husband ran a farm near a village on the edge of a wilderness. She started learning herbalism from an older woman, and very slowly developed as a witch (a wizard by the rules). Experience was very slow - she could only gain xps when some wilderness creatures attacked, or a band of raiders came through.

When her husband died of old age, Old Granny Greyfeather sold the farm and started traveling again, a stern, crotchety, no-nonsense witch, gnarled and tough as an old oak.

[The_Werebear]

Mine was a Bard/Master Thrower. Of Noble Origin, he was perpetually improvised from his extravagent lifestyle and his ability to throw 3-5 thousand gold worth of magic shurikens into the enemy every combat. Dual Wielding, Palm Throw, and Haste means Victor is a poor man.

[Bacon Elemental]

I'm not sure if this counts as a stupid character concept because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but...

I had a paladin and I wanted her to worship a death god, so the GM made up a code of conduct because we felt the standard one didnt really fit.
We didnt really consider the consequences of the clause forbidding the "desecrating of tombs" until she had to awkwardly stand outside a tomb we were exploring with her fingers in her ears while the rest of the party did what adventurers do when theyve just cleared a tomb of monsters.

[DuctTapeKatar]

I got one.

A bard who was raised by wolves.

Like, he'd be all cheery, and then when people ask him about his past, he's like, "Yeah, my birth parents abandoned me in the woods, luckily I was taken in by a nearby wolf pack. Once they told me I was adopted, I decided a couple years later that I should probably go find out who I am meant to be."

He'd be scruffy, lacking in proper table manners, and hitting on anything with some form of sentience.

[Thisguy_]

Playing off the Druid from earlier, my group is about to wrap up a Storm King's Thunder game with my character being a Wizard with a bee motif.

There's also an entire archetype I keep making of Fist Wizards, who are all based off of Alex Louis Armstrong. I've done a pure wizard, a sun soul monk, and in PF, a bloodrager (she turned out great) so far.

Oh, and my first-ever character was a Thief Rogue who was in it for the money. But not to spend the money. Only hoard it. He inherited like 30-50% of a doctrine from his father about money being a form of power or something, so he just kind of collected and stashed wealth. A lot of it. In caches. All over the place. Like some kind of gold squirrel.

[Arbane]

There's also an entire archetype I keep making of Fist Wizards, who are all based off of Alex Louis Armstrong. I've done a pure wizard, a sun soul monk, and in PF, a bloodrager (she turned out great) so far.

"I CAST FIST!"?

[Thisguy_]

"I CAST FIST!"?

Absolutely yes. The Sun Soul Monk edition of this concept got to yell that out pretty triumphantly at one point after using a recently unlocked ability.

[braveheart]

In my current campaign the party met a goblin, who doesn't speak common, but is insainly muscular, and massive... For a goblin, which means he is almost as tall and thick as the party dwarf, because he is non hostile the party has taken to calling him swoleblin